Miranda Wilcox

(Walter de Gruyter, 2016)

This book looks at how historical linguists accommodate the written records used for evidence. The limitations of the written record restrict our view of the past and the conclusions that we can draw about its language. However, the same limitations force us to be aware of the particularities of language. This collection blends the philological with the linguistic, combining questions of the particular with generalizations about language change.

Review by Grant Boswell presented at Faculty Book Lunch

Studies in the History of the English Language VII: Generalizing vs. Particularizing Methodologies in Historical Linguistic Analysis is co-edited by Miranda Wilcox and is published by De Gruyter Mouton, one of the largest and best publishers of volumes in linguistics and communicative sciences, publishing about ninety monographs and edited collections per year as well as forty academic journals and yearbooks in linguistics. Moreover, this volume is part of the Topics in English Linguistics series, begun in 2013 and in just under five years has published ninety-eight volumes. This volume is the ninety fourth in the series. And within this series is a collection of edited volumes, Studies in the History of the English Language, of which Miranda’s volume is the seventh and most recent title. The articles collected in the volume result from the eighth meeting of the Studies of the History of the English Language Conference held at BYU in September of 2013. The articles in the volume cover a range of topics in the history of the English language, illustrating the issues facing scholars in this field as the study of the history of English expanded from the literary to include the linguistic. These issues cover tensions between philological, historical linguistic, and theoretical linguistic interests; between traditional qualitative and contemporary quantitative, computational methodologies; and between general and particular foci. As an anecdote, when I started the MA program at BYU in 1978, the English language emphasis was comprised of four graduate courses in a two-year sequence: Old English, Beowulf, Middle English, and Chaucer. I still have the books on my shelf. Elements of Old English was first published in 1919 and is now in its tenth edition. A Handbook of Middle English was first published in English in 1952 and went through ten printings. We learned the language to read the literature. But things have changed. New theories such as Optimality Theory and new grammars such as Maxent Grammars not only allow texts to be revisited, they also make use of large corpora that enable us to observe language change from a much larger perspective. The articles are collected and organized to represent the varying approaches to the historical study of English and to implicitly make the case that the more the merrier because texts are the major record of this history, and old and new methodologies complement each other to ensure that the textual record is mined for all it has to offer. The twelve articles are organized under four headings: Particularizing and generalizing for written records, Particulars of authors, Particulars of communicative setting, and Particularizing from words. As someone who is coming to these articles after a long hiatus, I found them informative and enlightening. For a historian of the English language I can only imagine that the superb venue and the skillful selection and editing of the articles provides a welcome representation of the forces in the field of English language history and a centripetal tether to a centrifugal discipline.